Previews

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Two days in the company of Link finally reveals the first two dungeons.

Spiffy:

Everything appears to be on track for a classic Zelda experience; Wii controls are good!

Iffy:

This is going to be one of the longest Zelda games ever, but will it be too long for some gamers?

I just arrived home after spending 48 wonderful hours in the company of Nintendo, the Wii and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. This is really the first time that the final game has been shown to the gaming press, and while we've all killed the same E3 boss time and time again at various events since then, this was the opportunity to really get to grips with the final product. I'll start out by saying that Twilight Princess is going to be an epic game -- both in its scope and length. After a solid nine straight hours of gameplay, I had only just managed to complete the second dungeon. And there are nine in total. It's safe to say that first-timers are easily looking at 70 hours plus to see the whole game.

That makes it the biggest, longest Zelda game ever made, and whether or not that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen. This is the first of two previews about the initial stages of the game. In this piece, I'll be taking you through the first five or six hours, right up to the end of the first dungeon, which is called the Forest Temple. Exactly seven days from now, I'll be posting a second preview which spins you through to the end of the second dungeon, so stay tuned!

Nintendo had a nice setup waiting for me. A decent Sharp LCD widescreen display, a nice comfy chair and a Wii hooked up to the display via the all-important first-party component cables. This means that the game was running in true 16:9 aspect ratio in full 480p (progressive scan). Twilight Princess uses both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk controls as we know, but until this point, my biggest fear about the game was just how well it would play using these new methods of user input. Literally five minutes into the game, I knew everything was going to be ok. From the start of my experience all the way through nearly nine hours of gameplay, not once did I feel like the Wii's control system was to blame for inaccuracies or mistakes made. If I messed up, it was all on me, not the controls. This was indeed a huge relief and bodes really well for the Wii in general, not to mention the other games hitting the system.

Twilight Princess begins its story innocently enough with a scene featuring a young elfin lad, called Link, and his friend sitting around, enjoying a bit of peace and quiet. On the outskirts of Ordon Village, Link, a ram wrangler by trade, meets up with an old friend in the shape of Epona, his trusty horse. In order to summon Epona initially, you must first pluck a special piece of grass from the ground and blow into it. A sweet melodious whistle emanates around the area, and soon enough Epona trots into vision. Hopping on her back meant I could proceed into the heart of Ordon Village, where a bunch of tutorial-like tasks awaited.

The village taught me how to use most of the Wii's controls to perform various tasks such as talking to NPCs, fishing, climbing, running and jumping. Those of you familiar with the older 3D Zelda games, Ocarina of Time in particular, will begin to feel at home instantly in the game world. From the subtle musical scores to the characters and houses, everything seems to be very familiar indeed. After performing a bunch of errands for the local mayor and his populous, I ended up with a purse full of rupees, an empty bottle, a slingshot and a wooden training sword in my possession. It was time to learn how to aim, shoot and slap around some dummy targets, a process which eased me into the new and frankly fun method of combat.